According to Adriano Apra, this seldom-seen work is a masterpiece: and according to Lino Micciche, The Man With The Balloons marked the first step in Ferreri's development from “the poetics of the grotesque to the poetics of the absurd.” This film was so badly cut by producer Carlo Ponti that it was released in Italy only as a short episode of a three-part film called Oggi, Domani, Dopodomani. However, Ferreri rescued a copy, and re-shot some sequences in France, and it is his approved version of The Man With The Balloons that will be shown (possibly for the first time in this area) on this program. Marcello Mastroianni stars in The Man With The Balloons as a Milanese industrialist who becomes fascinated with the expansion capacity of balloons. The obvious sexual symbolism is only a point of departure in this remarkable, blackly humorous and semi-surreal study in obsessiveness.